What Makes a Good Walking City

Find out more about how this year's 500 cities were picked, studied and rated by the experts

Nov 3, 2011

Every year, Prevention partners with the American Podiatric Medical Association to come up with a list of America’s best walking cities. This year, they picked the 10 largest cities in each state and ranked them based on dozens of criteria, from the number of parks and schools to ozone levels and crime rates.

Find out what put your favorite city at the top--or bottom!--of the list.

Very Heavily Weighted Criteria

Expert Ratings

Professionals from six organizations devoted to making communities more walkable rated cities that they are familiar with based on a 4 to 1 scale, with 4 being the most walkable and 1 being the least walkable. See the next page for a list of experts and organizations.

Heavily Weighted Criteria

Walking Commuters

Percentage of residents who walk to work.

Green Space

The number of local, state, and national parks per square mile. Studies show that people are more likely to walk if they have safe, aesthetically pleasing places to walk nearby.

Safe Streets

The incidence of violent crimes (murder, rape, robbery, and assault) based on population. A score of 100 is the national average--anything under 100 is below the national average and anything above it is higher than the national average.

Medium-Weighted Criteria

Pedestrian fatalities

Number of pedestrian fatalities based on population.

Fitness Walking

Percentage of the population who walk for exercise.

Schools

Number of schools per square mile. Sidewalks and streets around schools tend to be more walker-friendly than other areas, so the more schools a city has the more walker-friendly areas there are.

Mass Transit

Percentage of the population who use mass transit as a form of transportation. Cities with more public transportation tend to be more walker-friendly.

Cars

Total number of cars per household. The more walkable a city is the less likely its residents are to need a car.

Low-Weighted Criteria

WalkScore

The number of destinations such as restaurants, stores, parks, libraries, theaters, and fitness centers within a walkable distance from the center of town as calculated by Walkscore.com, a website that rates cities’ walkability from 0 to 100, with 100 being best.

Air Quality

Based on measures from the Environmental Protection Agency and weather data from government sources, cities received index scores with 100 being the national average for air quality. Similar to the crime rating, lower scores are below the national average and higher scores are above the national average.

Rails to Trails Program

Cities that have railroad tracks that have been converted to walking or cycling trails within their county make walking a priority. Thus, cities that participate in the Rails to Trails program received a credit in our rating system.

Cleanliness

Cities that participate in the Keep America Beautiful program, which is a nonprofit dedicated to making the nation’s communities cleaner and greener, received a credit in our rating system.

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Experts

Professionals from six organizations devoted to making communities more walkable rated cities that they are familiar with based on a 4 to 1 scale, with 4 being the most walkable and 1 being the least walkable. Get to know the people who have a lot to say about cities made for walking.

Dan Burden

Founder and executive director of Walkable Communities, Inc., a non-profit organization helping North America develop pedestrian-friendly communities. Dan has had 25 years of experience in developing, promoting, and evaluating alternative transportation facilities, traffic calming practices and sustainable community design. He served for 16 years as Florida DOT’s State Bicycle and Pedestrian Coordinator and has personally photographed and examined walking and bicycling conditions in over 2,400 cities in the U.S. and abroad.

Kit Keller

Executive director of the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals, a professional membership organization whose members represent all levels of government, all sizes of consulting firms and non-profits, and work in the engineering, planning, landscape architecture, police, safety, health and promotion fields and specialize in improving conditions for bicycling and walking.

Fred Kent

Founder and president of Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities. Traveling over 150,000 miles each year, Fred offers technical assistance to communities and gives talks across the U.S. as well as internationally. Each year, he and the PPS staff train 10,000 people in Placemaking techniques, including transportation professionals. In addition to a graduate work in urban geography, he studied with Margaret Mead and worked with William H. Whyte, assisting in observations and film analysis of corporate plazas, urban streets, parks and other open spaces in New York City. He has taken over half a million photographs of public spaces and their users, which have appeared in exhibits, publications and articles.

David Levinger

Board member of America Walks, a national coalition of local advocacy groups dedicated to promoting walkable communities. He is also founder and president of The Mobility Education Foundation, an organization devoted to inducing a cultural shift in transportation habits, and affiliate associate professor of urban design & planning at the University of Washington. He served as the first executive director of Washington state’s Feet First, an organization devoted to promoting walkable communities, where he integrated the concerns of health, community, and land use design into the transportation context.

Kathy Madden

Senior vice president at Project for Public Spaces, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people create and sustain public spaces that build stronger communities. Kathy is an environmental designer who has been at PPS since its inception in 1975. She has directed numerous research and urban design projects, including starting the Urban Parks Institute, which brought together over 2,000 parks leaders, produced a volume of research and publications, and created a major online resource center, Urban Parks Online, for best practices and public space research.

Laura Sandt

Laura Sandt has been at the University of North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center since 2004. She is the Program Manager for the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) national clearinghouse, the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center. Laura has been involved in developing guides such as How to Develop a Pedestrian Safety Action Plan, Pedestrian Road Safety Audit Guidelines and Prompt Lists, and the Resident’s Guide for Creating Safe and Walkable Communities. Additionally, Laura has contributed to a number of FHWA and National Highway Traffic Safety Administration research projects analyzing pedestrian crash data and evaluating pedestrian safety improvements.

Ellen Vanderslice

Past president of America Walks, a national non-profit coalition of local pedestrian advocacy groups. Ellen, an architect, has been a transportation reform activist for more than 35 years, with first-hand experience of bicycle and transit issues in addition to a deep interest in walking. Since 1994, she has been a featured speaker on walking issues at more than two dozen conferences and events across the United States and around the world, including the International Conference on Walking. She is a currently project manager for Keep Portland Moving, an effort to keep downtown Portland vibrant and accessible while a light rail is being built on the Portland Mall.

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